Sunday, April 21, 2013

So we've reached the end of another pyweek, and I've managed another game ("Bane's Befuddlement"), so it's time for my usual post-pyweek post.

Since most of the usual suspects were busy with other things, I ended up doing a solo entry for the first time. I also decided, on something of a poorly thought-out whim, to use kivy for this entry.

Based on what happened with Mad Science (pyweek 14), I expected the solo entry to be something of struggle, and it does show in the end result. Artwork was obviously limited, since it's not my strong suite and I didn't want to spend a lot of time on the issue, but fortunately I was able to offset that somewhat by using one of the existing dungeon tile collections.

Probably the most crucial failing is ambition. Several of the past pyweek entries I'm been involved in have suffered from being overly ambitious (Nine Tales (pyweek 12) being the worst offender), so I aimed to avoid that pitfall this time. As a result, I was under-ambitious. The game isn't that challenging, and is a bit bland. It's not without potential, but needed more time spent on the initial concept to really get something I would have been happy with.

There are several things I am happy with. I reaffirmed my belief in the
importance of level editors for pyweek games. Even with the very
simplistic one I wrote here, I was able to fill out the level content
very quickly on Friday and Saturday as a result, and I rather like the careful level of stupid that AI achieves.

There are a few tricks about touch interfaces I need to learn. The
most obvious one from this game is to avoid anything that goes too close
to the edge of the screen - it's too easy to accidentally trigger one of
the other buttons in that case.

As an exercise in working more with kivy, this was pretty successful. I'm still uncertain about how I feel about kivy. It's quite nice in some ways - being able to add a settings pane or a popup dialog with only a couple of lines of code - but it's also all sorts of magic in ways that really aren't helpful. The complicated import dance needed to ensure that we set the configured window size before creating the kivy window is just one example of this sort of thing. More annoyingly, the inability to hook in to the command-line argument parsing without some serious monkey patching is the sort of poorly thought out design that makes working with it painful.

Python's still a work in progress on android, and, while it's possible to use pyjnius to access the hardware, and to build apk's, both require more fiddling with building python for android than I was prepared to do during a pyweek, so, while the game runs OK on my phone, it's missing some features which would be very nice to have. There is enough work happening in this space that this should improve, though.

Windows packaging with kivy is a pain, and the recommended approach of using pyinstaller just failed horribly for me. I'm not sure if where to lay the blame for that, but debugging windows issues is not my favourite activity, and anyway not something I'm capable of doing at the end of a pyweek.